Go Big or Go Home

Writing isn’t easy. I get that, but I can’t step away from it, even though it’s physically been impossible for me to have two seconds to myself, what with a house move and a one year old baby to help look after. And don’t get me started on the pandemic. But everyday, in my mind, there’s a small corner to myself where the stories bubble away and where I’ve been pondering the fundamental problem of how I am going to write a good - scratch that - fabulous story.

I’ve been lucky enough to have feedback from both a professional editor and a high profile agent, and for that I’m immensely grateful. The truth is, Damaskopolis as it is now is a generic novel. It’s too bland, bloated, and unwieldy. There are a lot of cool scenes, interesting characters, and a fascinating future world all peppered in between bland chapters that aren’t tying the story together very well. In fact, at times the story itself is a bit difficult for the reader to follow.

I’m going back to do another course, this time enticingly titled “How to write a Page Turner”. I know I can write dialogue, I can write interesting characters, and I’ve gotten better at setting the scene. But the magic stuff of putting it all together into an actualy story is a trick I have yet to master. I’ve been consciously avoiding tackling this beast for quite some time, but now I need to jump on and grab it by the mane.

It doesn’t matter how many story ideas you have or how much world building you do, if there isn’t a good old fashioned story in there somewhere, people aren’t going to bother reading your story. I don’t want to write a novel that people will politely tell me they ‘liked’. I want to write stories that pop out of the page and slap people in the face. I want to write white-knuckle rides and splashes of cold water that will have my friends and readers exhilarated at the end.

No more generic for me. It’s time to go big or go home!

On This Day…

…in 2012 I received news that my grandmother had passed away in Damascus. She had been the glue that held us all together and her passing away coincided with a time when our world seemed to be changing in ways we’d never imagined. A revolution and wars in Syria swept away our previous lives to the point where things would be almost unrecognisable to her today. This morning I woke up early to prepare the milk for Dani and get the coffee running. My wife had timed the washing to finish at around six am, and I proceeded to hang it to dry. At that moment, I remembered something about my gran.

Every morning in the winter, she’d wake up before sunrise to fire up our metal kerosene heater - called a Sobia, or soba - so that the house was warm when we woke up. She did that without fail for as long as I could remember. Snuggled up under the warm duvet, I could hear her slippers shuffling on the floor as she went about the house getting things ready and filling up the mazot from the massive barrel container we had in the back balcony into a plastic container. Then pouring it patiently into the heater before lighting a paper and dropping it inside it. The heater had a small porthole through which we could see the blue flame dancing about, and the metal groaned and clanked as the device burned into life. At night we would roast chestnuts and orange peels on the top of it and the house would smell amazing. Such mundane times and yet they feel so magical and remote in my memory.

Rest In Peace, Tete. I still remember you…